Gool by Maurice Gee Page B

of the northern wall. It turned sharply south and there it had been broken to half its height by cannon bolts in one of the forgotten wars. Duro clambered among the fallen stones, climbed the wall like stairs and looked over the city.
    Xantee went up beside him. The neighbourhood below them had seen heavy fighting and scarcely any building was whole. They had been mean buildings to start with, hovels for the class of workers little better than slaves. Now they were broken, bent, tipped over, rusty, rotten. They were weed-infested, and puddled in their yards and streets from the night’s rain. She saw rats running here and there. The wars had been a victory for rats. She saw no people, or signs of them.
    Tarl climbed up beside them.
    ‘The burrows are worse,’ he said.
    The fighting had been less fierce further into the city. Houses stood undamaged, sturdier than the ones by the eastern wall, worker dwellings in wood and stone. Even there no people moved.
    ‘That’s where I was born,’ Duro said. ‘My father worked for Ottmar in his salt warehouse.’
    Tarl gave a growl at the words ‘Ottmar’ and ‘salt’. At the foot of the wall the dogs heard him and whimpered.
    The sun came out from behind clouds and lit the hill where the Family mansions had stood. It picked out buildings in the city centre, some four or five storeys high. Their marble walls and columns turned pink – but they too were pocked with holes as black as bat caves. It was, Xantee supposed, the part of the city called Ceebeedee, where Company’s business had been done. Smoke rose here and there from morning fires, and she supposed people lived in the empty offices. She had thought the Clerk would live on the hill, in the great Ottmar mansion, but straining her eyes, she saw no sign of life. She made out only shapes that might be trees and broken walls.
    ‘Down,’ Tarl said suddenly. He pulled them on to a lower part of the wall as something whined over their heads.
    ‘Robber. Slingshot,’ he said.
    ‘Will he follow us?’
    ‘The dogs will have him if he does.’
    They kept on southwards through the scrub, staying clear of the city wall. It turned west, dropping down a long slope to the sea, and there before them, stretching mile on mile, lay the burrows. Xantee would not have believed so much desolation possible. Near at hand shattered stone and brick and twisted iron and rusty pipe were locked in a sinewy growth of creeping scrub. Once it was the outer edge of a great city. This rubble had been houses, shops, schools, taverns before the great Company ship, Open Hand, sailed into the harbour. She looked across the ruins, trying to identify Port, where the ship had berthed, but saw only broken walls, spiked and stepped and slanting, against the white sheen of the sea.
    ‘Where’s Blood Burrow?’ she whispered.
    ‘No Blood Burrow any more,’ Tarl said.
    ‘Where was it?’
    ‘By the wall. You went west to Keg and south to Keech. Everything is Keech now. Keech is king of the burrows.’
    ‘Where is he?’
    ‘See where the smoke comes up. That will be his fires.’ He pointed at a brown smudge south, towards the sea. ‘But he moves. Keech doesn’t leave his people alone. He knows the danger. He rewards. He punishes. No one knows if Keech will be behind him when he turns around.’
    ‘Can we keep away from him?’ Duro said.
    ‘We can try. But I only know Blood Burrow and he’s got men everywhere.’
    ‘Xantee and I can find them. We can make them forget.’
    ‘You’ll need to.’
    ‘Are we going in now?’ Xantee said. She felt it would be like walking into a swamp, like the jungle, but without the Peeps to keep them safe.
    ‘That’s what you wanted, girl,’ Tarl said.
    ‘What will we do for food and water?’
    ‘The rain’s coming again. No shortage of water. No shortage of food either –’ he smiled his snarling smile – ‘if you can eat what I kill.’
    He meant rats. She saw he was hungry for rats. She remembered that